The Art of Unfinishing
HP Fanfiction and the Power of Storytelling

by Cornelia Remi

Many avid Potter fans readers want to be more than just that - readers.
By inventing their own stories about
Harry Potter and other characters from
Rowling's books and by adding new
elements and structures to the Potter cosmos, they are assuming even the
author's role. They take on both Harry's
and J. K. Rowling's point of view. Thus the universe of the Potter books
appears to become deeper and richer every day. This growing complexity
mirrors thousands of individual reading experiences and unique encounters
with Rowling's books. As soon as
these experiences are put down in written narratives, fixed to the
computer screen, published on the internet and
read, they tend to blur the borders of Rowling's world, splitting it into
many possible Potter worlds which are only vaguely controlled by their
reference to the original stories.

This is not the place to discuss legal matters of copyright infringement
and plagiarism or originality or imitation, since it is generally accepted
today that any text is manifestly or secretly related to other texts. A
text can be derived from prior texts by means of imitation and transformation,
by continuing or renarrating it. The echoes of past texts and stories can
be heard in any work of literary fiction. This is not about intellectual
property. This is about reading, writing and the power of storytelling.

I.
The phenomenon of derivative stories is not something unique to the
Harry Potter books. This is
exactly what great stories always have done and always will do: they tend to
multiply, while usually still preserving their original identity. They
stimulate, incite and spur their readers to delve into the vast wealth of
their details and to explore their abundance of narrative cores and seeds.
By letting them grow into stories of their own. By experimenting and playing
with them. The stories born out of these creative games even may serve as a
commentary on Rowling's original texts
which makes us rethink various meanings and aspects of her work.

No one, not even the best storytellers in the world, can tell everything.
Not even the "happily ever after" phrase guarantees that the end has actually
been reached and that all threads and filaments of a story have found their
due place in its texture. How, where and when does a story begin and end?
Do we expect it to end, anyway? Must and can it actually end? It is relatively
simple to define the beginning and the end of a book. Even though we might
quarrel about the status of prefaces and epilogues, glossaries, titles
and footnotes, it seems safe to say that a book ends where its pages and
covers end. But what about a story? Does it end where its book ends, within
its paper garment? The moment we click on the close button of the document
in which it lies embedded on the computer screen? Does it end when we let
it slide out of our consciousness and memory or when the last evidence
testifying its existence has been destroyed?

A story does not end where it appears to end. Exactly those parts where
we believe to have spotted loose ends and void, chasms and abysses, holes
and gaps often turn out to be the densest passages of a text because they
invite us readers to take part in the making of the story. While the author
is gently guiding us in a certain direction, we may fill the gaps from
the reservoir of our own experiences and expectations.

Every story is saturated with such emptiness and indeterminacy and thus
forms an inexhaustible source of narrative potential; no story can be totally
complete and include the whole world in its cosmos, explore all its characters
down to the deepest depths of their minds, describe every minor movement
and detail. So much remains to be narrated: the untold events before, after
and parallel to a story's main plot; all the alternative courses and twists
it might have taken instead; the invisible letters concealed in the fibres
of its pages; the sounds and melodies vibrating in each of the words from
a storyteller's mouth; and the unspoken words hidden in the blank spaces
between lines and in the gaps of the plot. These stories do not necessarily
have to lie slumbering forever. They are Sleeping Beauties – just waiting
for someone to kiss them awake, someone who gives them an opportunity to
unfold their wings.

II.
Even in the Middle Ages or in the ancient world, people felt the urge
and desire to tell more. Sometimes simply in order not to let their favorite
stories fade into oblivion. More often probably in order to weave their
own interests, questions and point of views into them. They began telling
sequels and prequels, 'before' and 'after' stories, as well as stories
within the pretexts or spin-offs that focused on originally marginal events
and characters.

Take the apocryphal Infancy Gospels of St. James and St. Thomas, which
not only tell about some really weird miracles Jesus performs as a little
boy but even about his mother's birth and childhood. Take Homer's Iliad
and Odyssey, both, despite their grandeur and length, just comparatively
small extracts from a more comprehensive pool of stories. Consequently,
other poets expanded episodes from Homer's epics into works of their own,
like Euripides did in some of his great dramas, or built epic cycles of
prequels and sequels around his works. The most famous example is Virgil,
of course, whose Aeneid basically is an attempt to tell the story of the
Trojan War and its heroes' subsequent voyages from another point of view
than Homer.

In the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach put in train one of the most
voluminous spin-offs in the history of world literature when he added two
provocatively short and open poems to his Parzival (which, by the way,
adapts and expands a French model, the Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes).
In one of the most well-known scenes of this epic, the title hero encounters
his cousin Sigune, sitting in a linden tree with a dead knight in her lap.
The two Titurel fragments sketch parts of the preceding story that leads
to this puzzling and mysterious moment - a story about love, language,
reading and a dog leash. Clearly this was not enough to solve the riddle
of that scene. As the tender narrative branch shooting up from the Parzival
story was lacking a neat conclusion, it was later expanded to the size
of a respectable sequoia - the Younger Titurel, astoundingly not only the
most extensive German secular narrative of the 13th century but even the
most transmitted epic of its time.

Nowhere, indeed, can the urge to completion and continuation be observed
as conspicuously as in Arthurian romance. The stories about Arthur's knights
are assembled into chains and formed into clusters where one story sparks
off the next one. Even after the whole Arthurian universe seems to have
been gathered and brought to an end in the giant project of the Prose Lancelot,
the narration continues. Arthur's death is not the death of Arthurian storytelling,
the tradition of which is alive and productive into the present time: from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail to
The Mists of Avalon.

Think of the innumerable adaptations, sequels, prequels or parodies
which have blossomed from Shakespeare's dramas - books like
Mary Cowden Clarke's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines for
example. Think of the sheer overwhelming flood of
Jane Austen sequels. Think
of all the modernist rewritings of the classics. Think of the Star Wars
movies. And don't forget Harry Potter fanfiction.

An important difference must be noted, however, between fanfiction and
other narratives woven into and around preceding texts. The term of
"fanfiction" implies a devoted admiration of the prior text and its creator
that preserves a clear hierarchy between this core text (or text corpus) and
the fanfiction. Writers of Harry Potter fanfiction usually do not intend
their texts to compete with
Rowling's books, to surpass them
in quality or even to replace them. In this aspect their texts differ
considerably from attempts to exploit the Potter phenomenon commercially -
projects like the fake fifth Potter installment
Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon which was published
in China in 2002, pretending to be penned by Rowling herself.

The borderline between such copyright-violating imposture and devoted
fanfiction usually can be drawn quite clearly, while it is more difficult
to distinguish between fanfiction parodies or travesties and commercial
examples of that genre like Michael Gerber's
Barry Trotter and the Unauthorized Parody or the Potter-related
editions of Mad Magazine. As long as their attitude towards
Rowling's books keeps a balance
between caustic criticism and loving enthusiasm they probably might be
classified as samples of fanfiction as well, albeit commercial ones.

III.
So these are some of the techniques and instruments that writers of
HP fanfiction often use: they rearrange the given elements of Rowling's
stories and add new ones. Sometimes they transfer Rowling's characters
to different contexts and enjoy the tensions arising from those constellations.
Often they are moving along the margins of
Rowling's stories rather than
in their centre. Most frequently they tell
Harry's story from new points of view -
or they might choose not to tell Harry's
story, after all, but that of Draco,
Hermione,
Sirius,
Snape,
Neville or
Filch. This gives them the opportunity to
either enrich the plots of
Rowling's books with new material,
to add further subplots or to extend the original plots forward or backward
in time. How did the Dursleys leave the
Hut-on-the-Rock after Hagrid and
Harry had taken the boat back to the
mainland? Will Neville ever discover
his true magic powers? What did Lupin do
for a living before he started teaching
DADA at Hogwarts? How exactly was
Snape converted from a
Death Eater into a supporter of the
Order of the Phoenix? Will the
same happen to Draco Malfoy one day?
Which of Harry's friends will have to die
yet? And - most important:
Who will end up in love with whom?

The fact that romantic or even sexual relationships between characters
are a major topic in fanfiction - both Potter-related and in general -
leads us to some innate aesthetic problems of this kind of literature.
For even though fanfiction can reach a quite astonishing quality, it often
tends to gratify a comparatively plain desire for trivial plot patterns
and happy endings (although even an event like a marriage between
McGonagall and
Dumbledore seems quite harmless
compared to the changes that Nahum Tate inflicted on King Lear in 1681, by
having Lear return as ruler of his kingdom and Cordelia marry Edgar ...).
This flatness can be both amusing and dangerous as flat fanfiction stories
sometimes tend to transform their pretexts and force us to see only what
their writers want to see in Harry Potter - and nothing else ...

IV.
Fortunately certain limits are set to the interpreting and transforming
power of fanfiction - both in general and in the case of
Rowling's books. In a lecture on
Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Umberto Eco once offered a gripping
example for these limits: "But if Jack the Ripper told us that he did what
he did on the grounds of his interpretation of the Gospel according to
Saint Luke, I suspect that many reader-oriented critics would be inclined to
think that he read Saint Luke in a pretty preposterous way.
Non-reader-oriented critics would say that Jack the Ripper was deadly mad [...]"

In the special case of Harry Potter, however, even other difficulties
and problems arise for writers of fanfiction who do not want to be declared
lunatics. Some fanfiction attempts might indeed be doomed to 'failure'
by these special conditions. Because unlike Shakespeare, Homer, Wolfram
von Eschenbach or
Jane Austen,
Joanne K. Rowling is luckily still very
alive and active - and, preposterous as it might appear to some post-modernists
- she is writing the central, in a certain way definitive, story about
Harry, her own mind's child. Rowling rules! She can narrow down or widen
the narrative potential of her books decisively by killing off some characters
and introducing new ones.

Sometimes she even raises her voice in a deliberate attempt to contradict
certain rumours about her books -
and thus, against certain plotlines sketched by her imitators and writers of
fanfiction. The criticism inherent in the character of
Rita Skeeter might not only be aimed at
the mass media's attitude towards honesty and truthfulness, but even comment
on some overzealous writers of fanfiction ... Which might remind us of
Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote the second part of his Don Quijote partly in
defence against a certain Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda who had
published an unauthorised continuation of Cervantes' famous novel.

Therefore each attempt of writing Harry Potter fanfiction has to find
a balance between the indeterminacy of the texts and the determination
exercised by Harry's one and only true author - J. K. Rowling, who naturally
has privileged access to Harry's future and past, to the story of each
of her character's life, peculiarities and secrets. (We would never have
found out about the scar on
Albus Dumbledore's left knee and
its use for passengers of the London Underground unless Rowling had had him
tell McGonagall about it.)

Here we have a crucial point: Rowling is carefully cultivating her reputation
for detailed advance planning. Nobody knows the amount of material she still
has up her sleeve. And therefore nobody knows where exactly the borders of
the world she has imagined until now can be located - where it starts
merging into the unknown and undefined. This might be the case in any drawer
of Minerva McGonagall's desk as well
as just a few steps outside number four,
Privet Drive. And - let's face it - even if there are plans she has not
sketched and questions she has not answered yet for herself, she will find
the best answers as soon as she will be asked the matching questions. Shaping
Harry's world just in the very places it needs to be shaped - this is the
privilege of the author. Rowling's witty strategy of information handling
could be observed most clearly before the publication of
OP, when she played with her
readers' expectations by announcing the death of a major character. With
this in mind, the suspense she kept us in was at least doubled for some
chapters of OP: What, if
Mr Weasley ...?

So Rowling is setting the limits, even though these limits can be broken
by individual writers. An important reason why it seems so attractive and
exciting to write and read Harry Potter fanfiction just now is certainly
the knowledge that such limits exist and that all the major plotlines have
already been determined, although to us they still seem as indeterminate
as they do to the characters of
the books. The
centaurs may be able to
foresee the future, we aren't so blessed. Thus we Potter fans are living
in quite a special situation now, hovering between curiosity about Rowling's
definitive plans and the freedom to twist the plot however we want to twist
it – for the time being. The
Harry Potter series presents
itself as a preliminary fragment that appears so tempting and stimulating
just for its lack of closure. (And for some other qualities as well, of
course ...)

Writing and reading fanfiction can be pleasant and entertaining. But
however strong the impulse we receive from the narrative potential of
Rowling's books, our self-written
texts will never satisfy us as thoroughly as the original. Firstly, because
we know that they are not the definitive story. And secondly, because of a
deep-rooted paradox inherent in the very concept of fanfiction that urges us
into an impossible compromise between novelty and repetition. On one hand, we
long for reading something new and unexpected, a narrative surplus differing
from the Potterian adventures we have read so far. On the other hand, we
desire to reenact our past reading pleasures, to relive our first encounter
with the characters and events we are so familiar with.

But this cannot be done. The precious experience of our very first reading
is indeed unique and past forever even if we try to cherish it as well
as possible. However gripping the stories might be that are born out of
the fanfiction writers' fantasy - in the end they, like J. K. Rowling herself,
have to face one major disadvantage of their work: They cannot and will
never be able to read their own stories for a very first time. For this,
we pity you, Mrs Rowling.

Nevertheless we should not stop looking for more stories, questions
and answers in the Harry Potter cosmos. For, as the Swedish poet Karin
Boye remarks in one of her most famous poems: "Our journey might turn out
to be in vain / But it's the path itself that's worth the pain." Even if
the outcome does not always fulfil our desires and wishes - who would want
to live without stories?